“A change is as good as a vacation,” his supervisor had said, a bit too meaningfully in retrospect, when the leave-of-absence request had been granted. This led him to suspect that he’d been becoming a stranger for longer than he realized, and perhaps slipping a little in general. He knew he was getting too tired these days, fading out perhaps, not as self-sustaining as he had been, and his hair was going grey above his ears. He told himself, sitting in the new office that afternoon, that this change was exactly what he needed. He put Michaela’s most recent school photograph in a desk drawer, spent a meditative few minutes arranging his notebooks and pens, pulled the first file from the crate, and began to immerse himself in the case. Like sliding into a lake.
There were stills from a surveillance tape in a motel lobby in Cincinnati, the day before she had almost been caught, two or three years after she’d written in the Bible; Christopher looked at these with great interest. Lilia was rendered as a small child with short blond hair, caught at the instant she glanced up into the camera lens. The whole scene was a little fuzzy and unclear in the enlargement, the expression unreadable on her pixilated face. The man behind her could have been anyone: head down, shuffling through a wallet. Notes in Peter’s handwriting in the lower margin: Appears at ease, but he never looks up at cameras. He flipped back through the folders, feeling less displaced than he’d felt in months, and began reading from the beginning. It began with a missing-persons report, filed in the middle of November some years ago: in a rural area between the town of St.-Jean and the American border, a seven-year-old girl disappeared in the night. Her footprints were visible in the snow by the front door; she ran out barefoot into the lawn, and then someone lifted her and carried her away. The prints of a man’s boots led to the tire tracks down by the road.
Sunlight slanted in through the window and warmed the back of Christopher’s head. He closed his eyes for a second. The angle of light had changed; he was hungry; he had been reading for hours. The initial investigation seemed somehow botched to him; he had been reading a transcript of an interview with the girl’s mother and thinking that she seemed curiously detached, although it was of course a possibility that she had still been in shock at that point. He decided it might be necessary to interview her again at some point. Perhaps Lilia’s half-brother as well. He penciled Lilia’s half-brother’s name into a notebook, feeling more purposeful than he had in some time.
Christopher stood up, stretched, and went out into the street. The air outside was hot and still, and tourists wandered speaking English in a sea of French. A pair of girls were playing cellos on a street corner, and on the way back to the office with a sandwich and a coffee he stopped to listen to them for a few minutes, sipping his coffee and feeling that everything would be all right. He thought he might speak to his daughter tonight; it had been a long time since he’d had a real conversation with her. He’d ask her about school, maybe even offer to help out with her homework. He’d tell his wife that her hair looked beautiful. Once back at the desk he stretched out his legs and leaned back in the chair, the coffee immediately forgotten on a pile of old notes. He had read through everything. There was a map that Peter had started—a continental road map, four or five possible sightings circled in red with notations. There was a page of typed contact information: Lilia’s mother, one of Lilia’s schoolteachers, the detective who had initially handled the case in Quebec.
“You can’t,” Peter said when Christopher came to him later. “It’s in the contract.”
“It’s in the contract that I can’t talk to Lilia’s brother? Are you serious?”
“I am. I’m afraid the mother was adamant.” Peter was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk, looking through a stack of black-and-white photographs; all twenty of them had been taken within a space of seconds and depicted a man and a woman entering a motel.
“I see.”
“Oh, don’t read into it,” Peter said “She said her son had been through enough already; he’d been interviewed three times by various police detectives the day after his sister vanished, and I had to agree not to try to speak with him if I was going to take the case. She’s just being protective.”
“You’re certain that you couldn’t convince her otherwise?”
“I’m certain. You haven’t met this woman.”
“Fine,” he said.
He returned to his office and closed the door behind him. He looked at the Bible again for a moment and then set it aside to look at the map. He stared at the lines of highways leading out of Cincinnati and let his mind drift, looking for a pattern in the circles and notations and interstate lines, waiting for the old instinct to tell him which way they had gone. He closed his eyes. Follow the trajectory, cities circled in red, a car moving quickly over the surface of a map. His hand was writing her name in the margin of his notebook. Lilia. Lilia. Lilia. Lilia. His focus was absolute.
A thousand miles away in another country, but separated from him only by the thinnest possible sheen, a car moved quickly across the New Mexico desert. A landscape composed of sand and light, and the map folded on the dashboard was beginning to fade in the sunlight.
13.
There was a red pencil that Lilia’s father had purchased specifically for drawing squiggly lines on maps, and in a series of motel rooms they charted a course. They could go almost anywhere. Every direction was possible. They tossed a coin whenever they couldn’t reach an immediate agreement—if it’s heads we go to Santa Barbara, tails means we’re going north—unless there was a music festival or a concert of some sort that her father wanted to go to, in which case he had veto power. In the impeccable past before the broken-down present, in the long hectic interlude before she’d begun leaving people behind, pre-Eli, it sometimes really was as simple as a coin toss.
“One thing you might want to think about,” her father said when she was sixteen, “is whether you maybe want to stop traveling someday.” She knew him well enough to understand that what he meant was I’m worried about you, I want you to stop, but she couldn’t: at sixteen she was traveling alone to San Diego with her father worrying about her in the small town where he’d settled in the New Mexico desert, and when she was seventeen and eighteen she hadn’t come back yet, except for short visits, and she lived in another ten or fifteen cities and towns in the confused interlude of time between her eighteenth and twentieth birthdays.
She never asked for money from him, although he sent it sometimes unsolicited. It was possible to get by, from city to city: there was always a room she could rent, there was always a dishwashing job or a job in a stockroom or a job sweeping the floor in a salon, there was always enough to get by and eventually enough to travel away again. What she aspired to was a kind of delirious perfection. What Lilia wanted was to travel, but not only that; she wanted to be a citizen of everywhere, free-wheeling and capable of instant flight. There were complicated sequences of travel: maps, suitcases, buses moving slowly through the interstate nights, garbled announcements of departures and delays in the tiled aquarium acoustics of bus terminals and train stations, clocks set high on the walls of station waiting rooms.
In San Diego there was no one; she arrived young and exuberantly alone and stayed for three months working in a doughnut shop, and then began making her way up the coast. When she’d reached the top of the American coastline (it seemed unwise to cross the border) she turned and started to make her way back down again, and by then she was seventeen and people had begun to attach themselves to her in almost every city she stopped in. In San Francisco there was Edwin. He walked up and down hills in the rain with her and held her hand in the park. In Sacramento there was Arthur, who made exquisite pasta dishes and wanted to be a professional chef. In Santa Paula there was Gene, and Santos lived in Pinto Beach. In Los Angeles there was Trent, and later another Edwin, who was more interesting than the first one but not as kind. Her second time through San Diego there was Gareth, and then she turned inland toward the middle of the con
tinent and a string of barely memorable Michaels and Daves. In her memories of a dozen other cities there are ghosts with no names; conversely, there are several minor lovers whose geographical locations can’t be pinpointed in memory beyond small details like a Persian rug in one of their apartments, an angle of streetlight across the living room ceiling of another, a bright-blue alarm clock in the bedroom of a third. The first girl, Lucy, lived in Denver. In Indianapolis there was Peter, who played Vivaldi on his record player and made origami swans. In St. Paul there was a more important Michael, who liked expensive red wine and was trying to be a freelance writer, and in Minneapolis there was Theo. In St. Louis there was no one, but she was only there for a week.
In Chicago there was Erica. Lilia was twenty-two years old by then, getting a little tired and beginning to think about New York, which was one of the few cities in the United States where she had never been; she stayed in Chicago for two months and then left with very little warning. On the last night she got into an argument with Erica, and they sat together in silence for a long time afterward at a table by the railing on the high mezzanine of Erica’s favorite bar. Erica sipped her beer and gazed down over the edge. It was close to midnight, and a waitress had brought a candle to each table; the candles flickered individually in the dimness and Lilia stared blankly at the hundred scattered bits of flame, thinking of what New York City might be like and how she might get out of the bar without making Erica cry again.
Erica moved her glass in front of the candle. The flame shining through it transformed her beer into a glass of pure light. It took a moment for Lilia to realize that Erica was speaking to her.
“I’m sorry. What were you saying?”
“That waitress,” Erica said “I was saying she’s interesting, don’t you think?” She was looking down over the mezzanine railing. The girl who’d brought the beer and the candlelight was wiping down a table by the bar, and to Lilia’s eye she wasn’t fascinating at first glance: white shirt, black pants, well-executed ponytail, autopilot expression, red lipstick.
“What’s interesting about her?” Lilia was distracted and upset, thinking of tomorrow morning’s bus schedule and never seeing Erica again, and from the mezzanine the waitress just looked like any other waitress. One thing that had begun to trouble Lilia lately was the way that sometimes all people and all cities looked the same to her.
“She has a tattoo on the back of her wrist,” said Erica dreamily. “You can see it when she reaches for things.” She was watching the girl wipe the surface of a dark wood table.
“So?”
“I like waitresses with tattoos,” Erica said. “It implies the existence of a secret life.”
Lilia liked this idea, although she didn’t tell Erica that, and she saw what Erica meant when the waitress brought a new ashtray. The tattoo was a snake biting its own tail, in a perfect bluish-green infinite circle on the back of her left wrist.
“It’s a good tattoo,” Lilia said, but Erica’s thoughts were already elsewhere; she was smiling at Lilia now, looking at her consideringly; she pushed a long strand of blue hair back from her face before she spoke.
“I still think it’s courageous, Lilia,” she said brightly, picking up the scent of the earlier argument, “whatever you want to call it.”
Lilia sighed and sipped halfheartedly at her wine, wishing she was gone already. She had decided earlier in the evening never to give anyone advance warning of departure ever again.
“I mean, I know you think it’s nothing, but it just impresses me. I could never do that. Just pack up and go like that, without any warning, or almost none, to just pick up and move your whole life . . .”
“There’s nothing very brave about it, actually. I didn’t say it was nothing, I just said it isn’t courageous.”
“Please.” Erica was momentarily distracted by her pint of beer. “Do you even know anyone in New York City?”
Lilia shook her head. She was playing idly with two empty cigarette boxes, combining them with the salt and pepper shakers to build an unstable little house.
“Do you have a place to stay?”
“No.”
“A job?”
“I’ll find something.”
“There, you see?” Erica leaned back in her chair as if she’d just proved something. Her smile bordered on smug. “That’s courage,” she said, “whatever you want to call it.”
“You don’t understand.” Lilia found at that moment that she had no patience for anything: for this city, this street, this relentlessly trendy split-level bar, the identically dressed waitresses gliding between tables, this blue-haired girl across the table with the beer. The sadness of the waitress’s blue-green snake tattoo, circling forever on the same tired wrist. She let her cigarette-box house fall down in disarray. “It isn’t courage, Erica, it’s exactly the opposite. There’s nothing good about it. It’s exactly like running away from everything that matters, and I wish I could make you understand that.”
“Please. How many places have you moved to since you went out on your own?”
“Since I was sixteen? I don’t know. Maybe twenty. Probably more. But you’re still missing the point completely.”
“Just in the last two years, say. How many have you moved to in the last two years?”
“I don’t know, Erica. You’re still not getting this. It’s just, listen, I’ve never moved to anywhere in my life. When I show up in a city, it doesn’t mean I’m arriving, it only means . . . when I show up,” Lilia said, floundering now, repeating herself, “I’m not arriving anywhere, I’m only leaving somewhere else.”
“I still think—”
“You’re not listening. You don’t get it. It isn’t admirable. I cannot stop. All I ever do is leave, and I apparently don’t even do that very well, since you’re sitting there starting to cry because I’m leaving tomorrow, and I’m always running out of time. I am always running out of time. Are you completely incapable of understanding this? This, is all, I ever, do, and there is absolutely nothing admirable about it.”
Erica was stricken. The tears were starting to win. This only made her more beautiful, and Lilia thought she might die if the moment didn’t end, so she stood up and moved around the table and kissed the blue hair that she’d already kissed so many times. The kiss released a sob, and Erica held one hand over her eyes, her face shining in the candlelight. Lilia was moving quickly past her, down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk, where the Friday-night crowd moved around her like ghosts. She fumbled in her jacket pocket for her cell phone and dialed as she walked down the crowded sidewalk; she crossed the street quickly and stood in a doorway while the call went through.
“It’s good to hear your voice,” her father said. There was a baby crying in the background, her latest half-sibling, and she could hear his girlfriend’s soothing voice. The sounds brought her back to his house in the desert, the smell of French fries in the diner where her father’s girlfriend worked, long walks down cracked streets in the cool desert twilight, and she closed her eyes against the sheer oppositeness of the cold bright city. “Where are you?” he asked.
“Still in Chicago.” She forced her voice to be light. “But I wanted to call and tell you that I’m moving to New York City tomorrow.”
“New York New York,” he said. “Fine choice, kiddo. I spent some years there. Do you need money?”
“I’ll find another job.”
“I’ll send you a wire transfer tomorrow.”
Across the street, some distance down the block, Erica had emerged from the bar. She had an unsteady look about her. She stood on the edge of the sidewalk, looking up and down the street. Lilia sank back into the doorway for a moment, then changed her mind and walked away quickly.
“Do you know what’s strange?” she asked.
“What’s that, my dove?”
“I thought I saw the detective in St. Louis a couple of months ago. I walked out of a deli, and there was a man across the street with that same kind
of hat, that fedora thing. He had a cane. He was just stepping into another store, and I couldn’t see his face, but I felt like he was watching me, just for that instant when I came out of the deli.”
“Is that why you left St. Louis?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I wanted to see Chicago again.”
“Seems impossible that he’d be around, after what happened,” her father said carefully. “Doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Lilia had turned a corner; she was looking up and down the street, but Erica was nowhere. “It must have been someone else. But it seemed like he was watching me.”
“I’m worried about you,” her father said.
“Don’t be. I’m always fine.”
“I know you’re always fine,” he said, “but there’s no reason to be traveling quite so constantly these days, wouldn’t you agree?”
“You taught me how to travel.”
“Quite true, my lily. However, since you were so clearly paying attention to my example, you’ll notice that I did eventually stop. Have you considered settling somewhere for a year or two, just as an experiment?”
“The thought does cross my mind occasionally.”
“No one’s watching you anymore.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because you’re not an abducted child, you’re a legal adult. No one has any reason to be looking for you. You successfully disappeared.”
“A private detective could still look for me.”
“He was in an accident,” her father said softly.